In-flight experience: a cloud inside the plane

About this episode

In-flight entertainment now runs on a cloud. Not the one on the ground, a cloud inside the aircraft. A 300-watt onboard data center running Kubernetes, managed databases and observability, built to survive vibration, fire and electromagnetic interference. Then AI agents on top so airlines can talk to their fleet. Romain sits down with Frédéric Faria, Chief Technology and Engineering Officer, and Yann Nicolas, Chief Data and AI Officer, at Thales In-Flight Experience, to unpack FlytEDGE, the cloud-native in-flight entertainment platform. Key topics covered: • Why most aircraft still get content by USB drive, and how connectivity changes that • Designing an aviation-grade onboard data center: about 100 TB of storage in a 300 W budget • Vanilla Kubernetes, Helm and GitOps for updates and rollbacks in flight • An open onboard SDK with REST APIs for flight data (position, speed, origin, destination) • Multi-tenancy, data minimization and forensic watermarking for studio content • Global delivery with Amazon CloudFront and caching once per aircraft • A conversational ops agent built with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, AgentCore Gateway and Strands Agents • Rolling out Kiro to hundreds of engineers, beyond software teams Chapters: 00:00 Intro: your in-flight entertainment, now in the cloud 00:51 Welcome: Thales In-Flight Experience, 2 million passengers a day 07:24 What changed: connectivity and the end of the USB drive 12:36 A data center on board: 300 W, 100 TB, Kubernetes 18:00 Vanilla Kubernetes, Helm and GitOps at 35,000 feet 27:07 Opening the platform: onboard SDK, aircraft APIs, partners 32:52 Multi-tenancy, privacy and global delivery with CloudFront 41:19 DRM and forensic watermarking 47:35 AI agents for airline ops with Bedrock AgentCore and Strands 1:00:42 Kiro across the engineering org, books and dev tools

Links

Here are the links to the tools, technologies, or articles we mentioned in this episode.